Me And Sacha Baron Cohen

NEW YORK CITY — My moment in the spotlight with Sacha Baron Cohen began when Paramount Pictures sent e-mails to journalists asking for questions for Admiral General Aladeen.

The fictional African tyrant is the lead character in Baron Cohen’s new film The Dictator, which is being promoted in a slightly different way. While movie studios frequently hold “junkets” — events to which journalists are flown to a city like New York to see the film, eat generous buffet lunches and then interview the stars or, more frequently, attend press conferences with them — Baron Cohen would not be available on the usual way.

He would be at the press conference, but he would be in character, as Aladeen. And he would answer questions, but they would be screened. What they were looking for, I guessed, were straight lines: softballs that Baron Cohen could smack off the wall.

On the day of the event, while hundreds of reporters crowded into the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel where the press conference was to be held, a studio representative told me that I was one of about 20 who had been chosen to ask a question. It was one of the ones I had submitted: “I’d like to know what the dictator thinks of the American film industry. It must be quite different from what he’s used to at home.”

As Baron Cohen stood on a stage, dressed as the anti-Semitic dictator, I was called to the microphone. Before I could start, the Admiral General interrupted me.

“Why don’t you take your hat off?,” he said in a thick, mock-dictatorial accent. I removed the grey checked cap I had worn all day. “Put it back on again,” the Admiral General said. “Grow some f-g hair.”

Laughter from my jealous peers. Then the dictator asked me where I was from. “Canada,” I said. “You are more hated than Wadiya,” Aladeen assured me, to more laughter.

Finally I asked my question.

“I love American films, particularly their fantasy films like Lord of the Rings or Schindler’s List,” the character began, part of an amusing but sometimes tired catalogue of Hollywood jokes (Mel Gibson is head of Wadiya’s Holocaust Denial Institute). At one stage, Aladeen said that he doesn’t rely on CGI effects, but he seemed to be stumbling — as an African dictator might — over the acronym. I heard a question mark after CGI.

At the end of his answer, I found myself still standing at the microphone, grinning uselessly.

“You are going to stand there all day?,” said Aladeen. “Go.”

Baron Cohen answered questions for half an hour, flirting with the more attractive female journalists and insulting an Israeli who tried to sneak in a second question (“This is why people don’t like the Israelis.”) Then he left, giving a shout-out to our short but fruitful interaction.

“You may enjoy the prostitutes we brought in,” he told the journalists. “Or the boys if you like, if you are from Canada.”